Digital multimedia capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, digital media players, and the like. Digital multimedia devices may implement video coding techniques, such as MPEG-2, ITU-H.263, MPEG-4, or ITU-H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), to transmit and receive or store and retrieve digital video data more efficiently. Video encoding techniques may perform video compression via spatial and temporal prediction to reduce or remove redundancy inherent in video sequences.
A video capture device, e.g., video camera, captures a video stream and sends it to a video encoder for encoding. The video encoder processes the video stream, encodes the processed video stream, and transmits the encoded video data for storage or decoding and display. The available bandwidth for storing or transmitting the video is often limited and is affected by factors such as the video encoding data rate.
Several factors contribute to the video encoding data rate. Therefore, when designing video encoders, one of the concerns is improving the video encoding data rate. Generally, improvements are implemented in the video encoder and often add extra computation complexity to the video encoder, which can offset some of the benefits of an improved video encoding data rate.